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The first of the wildly successful His Dark Materials trilogy of Phillip Pullman penned books gets a big screen treatment as The Golden Compass which is the US title of the book released in the UK as Northern Lights. It's a traditional, and fairly typical, story of good against evil but it's, frankly, a completely baffling one.

The story centres around a young girl, Lyra Belacqua, who inherits a magical device, a Golden Compass, which can answer any question it is asked. The magical device helps her on her quest to liberate some friends from experiments being conducted at the hands of the evil authorities in "the North".

I left the cinema understanding very little. There's a golden compass, some Egyptians, some witches, and a lot of fuss about dust and parallel universes being investigated by Daniel Craig's professor. In short, it's one huge confusing mess and that leaves it well, well, short of par. However, to be fair, par is probably impossibly high, standing somewhere around the Fellowship of the Ring, which stands as a true testament to brilliant narrative film-making. On the positive side, this nowhere near plumbs the insipid depths of the first two Harry Potter films. Still, you should rarely leave a cinema more confused than when you went in, especially not in children's films of this ilk. Messy.

On the positive side, the performances are sound. Dakota Blue Richards is excellent as the cheeky and very watchable Lyra and Nicole Kidman shimmers and dazzles with icy sublimity as Marisa Coulter, the glamourous villainesss of the piece. Daniel Craig, on the other hand, sleepwalks his way through as Lord Asriel.

Interesting characters flit in an out, not least of which is the Ian Mckellan voiced Iorek Byrnison, a huge great armour-clad bear exiled from his rightful place as king of the bears, but others are silly and/or underdeveloped, as, regrettably, is Byrnison's fate. And, most shamefully of all, would-be interesting sidelines are rushed through and not dealt with with the care and attention they deserve and, once again, Byrnison suffers here.

It hasn't turned me off from seeing the next two films in the trilogy, but neither has it got me remotely salivating for the sequel in the way the Fellowship achieved so brilliantly.